MADE IN CHINA

A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights

CHINESE WORKERS AND THE LAW: MISPLACED TRUST? Ivan Franceschini LAYING OFF RESPONSIBILITY Nicholas Loubere INTERPRETING THE RULE OF LAW IN CHINA Elisa Nesossi

MADE IN

CHINA

2016

A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights

MADE IN

CHINA

Made in China

Made in China is a quarterly newsletter on Chinese labour, civil society, and rights. This project has been produced with the financial assistance of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), Australian National University, and the European Union Horizon 2020 research and

inno-vation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 654852. The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of the European Union, CIW, or the institutions to which the authors are affiliated.

EDITORIAL(P.05) Ivan Franceschini Kevin Lin BRIEFS (P.06) CHINA COLUMNS (P.9) THE RESISTANCE OF WALMART WORKERS IN CHINA: A BREAKTHROUGH IN THE CHINESE LABOUR MOVEMENT (P.11)

Anita Chan

FORUM (P.24)

INTERPRETING THE RULE OF LAW IN CHINA (P.26) Elisa Nesossi

ISSUE #2

APRIL-JUNE 2016

CHINESE WORKERS AND THE LAW: MISPLACED TRUST? (P.16)

Ivan Franceschini

ACADEMIC WATCH (P.42)

ELI FRIEDMAN ON ‘CHINA ON STRIKE’ (P.42) TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORS Ivan Franceschini Kevin Lin COPY-EDITING Sharon Strange

PRODUCTION AND DESIGN Tommaso Facchin ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS Anita Chan Nicholas Loubere Elisa Nesossi Joshua Rosenzweig Ewan Smith Susan Trevaskes PHOTO CREDITS Chen Xin ( Cover) Black Station (P.9-10)

Peter Van Den Bossche (P.12) Mariana Santana (P.23)

2016

THE FOREIGN NGOs MANAGEMENT LAW: A COMPENDIUM (P.34) Ivan Franceschini Elisa Nesossi

WHY MADE IN

CHINA?

In the last few years, the Chinese labour movement has witnessed significant developments, not only with the occurrence of some of the largest strikes in decades but also the emergence of grave chal-lenges for workers and activists. Made in China springs from the belief that this calls for more seri-ous analysis from both scholars and practitioners, as well for a critical engagement with a broader international audience interested in forging inter-national solidarity.

5 MADE IN CHINA - EDITORIAL

We are pleased to announce the second issue of Made in China. In this issue, we open with a series of Briefs that provide

an overview of notable stories that have taken place over the past three months. In the last quarter, one of the most important developments for Chinese civil society is the passing of the Law on the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activities within Main-land China on 28 April. Although a draft released early last year had received exten-sive domestic and international criticism, the Law was passed with only minor revi-sions. What we previously described as a sword of Damocles looming over Chinese civil society has now become reality.

To contextualise the language of the Law and shed light on its possible implications, we have compiled The Foreign NGOs Management Law: A Compendium. While

the new legislation indeed helps to clarify what is a substantial grey area in the Chi-nese legal system, the specific terms of the Law have grave implications not only for international NGOs operating in China, but also for the whole of Chinese civil society. This is especially true for those organisa-tions that operate in politically sensitive fields such as labour and human rights.

In the China Columns section, we pres-ent three articles. In Walmart Workers in China: A Breakthrough in the Chinese Labour Movement, Anita Chan highlights

the historical importance of the recent struggles of Walmart workers in China. In Chinese Workers and the Law: Mis-placed Trust?, Ivan Franceschini reflects

on the ‘rights awakening’ of Chinese work-ers, challenging some widely held assump-tions. Following up on the tribulations facing state workers in China that we

out-HAMMER TO FALL

Harder Times Ahead for Chinese Civil Society

lined in the last issue, Laying Off Respon-sibility: Microcredit, Entrepreneurship, and China’s Industrial Retrenchment by

Nicholas Loubere offers an analysis of the political and ideological implications of resorting to microcredit to promote entre-preneurial activity among laid-off workers.

The arbitrary detention of rights ad-vocates and lawyers over the last year has renewed interest in re-evaluating the meaning of the discourse of the rule of law promoted by the Chinese authorities. This issue includes a forum, Interpreting the Rule of Law in China: A Discussion,

edited by Elisa Nesossi with contributions from legal experts Joshua Rosenzweig, Ewan Smith, and Sue Trevaskes. This dis-cussion puts the concept of the rule of law in China in a wider historical and political perspective, and deconstructs its multiple dimensions and specificities.

Finally, in the Academic Watch sec-tion, we introduce China on Strike, a new book on the struggles of Chinese workers, through a conversation with one of the co-editors Eli Friedman.

This journal is hosted by Chinoiresie.

info, a collective blog edited by young

scholars and dedicated to the analysis of Chinese society. If you would like to con-tribute a piece of writing, you can contact us at madeinchina@chinoiresie.info. If

you would like to receive this journal reg-ularly by email, you can subscribe at this link: www.chinoiresie.info/madeinchina.

We welcome any feedback and we hope you will consider sharing this journal with your friends and colleagues.

The Editors, Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin

APR/JUN

2016

PC: QINGNIAN BAO

On 8 April, He Xiaobo, one of the labour activists taken into custody in early December 2015, was released on bail after being charged with embez-zlement. A 42-year-old former migrant worker, He is the director of the Nanfeiyan Social Work Ser-vice Centre, an NGO based in Foshan, Guangdong, that specialises in providing legal aid to victims of work-related accidents and occupational diseases. Another two labour activists, Zeng Feiyang and Meng Han, of the Panyu Migrant Workers Centre, an NGO based in Guangzhou, currently remain under detention with the charge of ‘disrupting so-cial order’. In late December, Chinese state media publicly accused Zeng of having embezzled money from factory workers, having affairs with several female workers, and writing ‘vulgar’ messages to women online. His mother Chen Wenying later at-tempted to sue the official Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television, demanding one mil-lion yuan in compensation for defamation, but in April she dropped charges due to the unrelenting pressures she and her family had been subjected to in the wake of the lawsuit.

(Sources: Guardian, Quartz, South China Morning Post, Xinhua)

He Xiaobo Released on Bail, Zeng

Feiyang’s Mother Attempts to

Sue Official Media

On 28 April, the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, passed the long-awaited Law on the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activi-ties within Mainland China. The new Law, which will come into effect on 1 January 2017, fills a grey area of the Chinese legal system, stipulating that any foreign group wishing to operate in China must register with the public security authori-ties. This means that the Ministry of Public Se-curity and its local branches down to the county level will formally be in charge of supervising all activities of foreign NGOs in China. The passage of the Law signifies increasing restrictions on the activities of foreign NGOs. Not only will they be barred from engaging in political or religious ac-tivities, or acting in a way that damages ‘China’s national interests’ or ‘ethnic unity’, but criminal measures can also be taken against individuals who are suspected of having engaged in activities that violate these broadly worded principles. As most foreign NGOs operating in China do not have any official registration, no official data are avail-able on their numbers. However, according to one estimate more than 7,000 international organisa-tions are active in the country today. In light of this widespread presence, the Chinese authorities have argued that such regulation is long overdue, with an op-ed published on the People’s Day on 4 May rhetorically asking: ‘If you do not violate the law, what are you afraid about?’ Still, critics maintain that the laws amount to a crackdown. To allow our readers to have an informed opinion on the matter, on pp. 34-40 of this issue of Made in

China you can find a compendium of the Law.

(Sources: BBC, China Law Translate, Guardian, People’s Daily)

7

On 22 April, the local authorities of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, released a set of ‘Draft Regu-lations on the Construction Market’, giving the public one month to provide feedback. The Reg-ulations, which aimed at ‘standardising the man-agement of the construction market, protecting the order of the construction market, and guaran-teeing the legal rights and interests of the actors involved’, attracted public backlash because in their initial formulation they included provisions calling for punishment again those construction workers who adopted ‘extreme measures’ when fighting to claim unpaid wages. In particular, this early draft explicitly prohibited acts such as climbing on cranes or buildings and threatening to jump—relatively common occurrences in the construction industry in China—saying offenders would be handed over to the judicial system. It also banned workers from using force or money to convince others to join protests. It is not clear how or why, but a draft subsequently released for public comment in May no longer included such provisions.

(Sources: Caixin English, Caixin Chinese,

People’s Daily, Dahe.cn, Zhengzhou People’s Congress Website)

Henan Local Regulations Forbid

Workers from Resorting to Extreme

Measures to Pursue Back Pay

Walmart Employees

Campaigning against Flexible

Scheduling

On 16 May, Walmart announced a new flexible scheduling system—the so-called ‘comprehensive work hour calculation system’—to be implemented across its retail stores in China, and asked its em-ployees to sign a written declaration in which they agree to the new system. In contrast to the current standard eight-hour working day for full-time workers, with the new system Walmart will be able to schedule any number of hours, as long as they add up to 174 hours per month. Not only would the new system reduce workers’ overtime payment, but it would also introduce an erratic work schedule. The Jinan Daily quoted a Walmart worker as saying: ‘We are comfortable with the eight-hour working day. After switching to the new scheduling system, if management requests us to work twelve hours today and four hours to-morrow and if we sign the agreement, then we cannot refuse. This system will bring extreme un-certainty.’ Walmart has previously attempted to implement this scheduling system but failed due to the resistance of its employees. The current op-position against the new scheduling has been led by an unofficial Walmart Chinese Workers Asso-ciation (WCWA) founded by several current and former Walmart workers in 2014. With the hope of securing the support of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), on 28 May the WCWA sent an open letter to the ACFTU co-signed by more than eight hundred Walmart workers. On 14 June, the Guangdong branch of the ACFTU issued a statement in which, without naming Walmart, it reiterated that the use of the comprehensive work hour calculation system in the retail sector is inconsistent with the existing regulations, and any labour dispute caused by the implementation of such system must be reported to the union for timely intervention. For further details, see Anita Chan’s article on pp. 11-14 of this issue of Made in

China.

(Sources: Jinan Daily, Sixth Tone, TheNation)

MADE IN CHINA - BRIEFS

On 16 June, Lu Yuyu and his partner Li Tingyu, chroniclers of protests in China on their website

Wickedonna, were detained in the southwestern

city of Dali, Yunnan Province, where they lived. They are accused of ‘picking quarrels and provok-ing troubles’, a charge that is often used to silence activists in China. Since 2012, the couple has been gathering and posting text and images from Chi-nese social media, such as Weibo and Baidu Tieba, to document protests in China—providing what is arguably the most comprehensive daily updates of social upheavals across the country, including many labour protests. After dropping out of uni-versity, Lu became a migrant worker and in 2012. While in Shanghai, he had his first taste of politi-cal activism, publicly showing his support for five young people who were arrested in Guangzhou for holding up placards that called for president Hu Jintao to disclose his assets. At the time, Lu held up a similar poster in one of Shanghai’s busiest shopping districts, until the police intervened and expelled him from the city. Over the years, he con-tinued to be harassed by state security for his ac-tivism and documentation work. His accounts on Chinese social media have been deleted more than one hundred times. In a profile published by The

Week, Lu was quoted as saying: ‘As long as I am

not in jail, I will continue to do it.’ Amnesty In-ternational has called for the couple’s immediate release.

(Sources: The New York Times, The Week,

Amnesty International, Wickedonna)

Social Media Archivists of

Protests in China Detained

On 31 May, prosecutors in Inner Mongolia an-nounced the indictment of 74 people for the kill-ing of 17 mine workers. The killkill-ings were for the purpose of faking mining accidents in order to blackmail mine owners running unlicensed op-erations into paying compensation. The compen-sation payments ranged from 500,000 to 800,000 yuan. In a scheme that brings to mind the plot of the movie Blind Shaft, directed by Li Yang, these suspects lured victims from poor villages, and paid them a higher than average daily wage to work in the coalmines. The victims were then murdered within days. The actual number of victims is likely to be higher, as corpses were quickly cemented and disposed of. The killing of these 17 people was discovered in January 2015, when the police were investigating a mining accident and found that some of the victims were actually alive. Newspa-pers have reported on similar schemes in the past. For instance, in 2009 the police discovered that several people from a village in Leibo County, Si-chuan Province, were involved in buying or kid-napping people with severe mental problems only to sell them as slaves or to kill them in the mines in order to get compensation.

(Sources: China News, Caijing, The New York Times)

Mine Murders Uncovered in

Mongolia

CHINA

COLUMNS

9 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

Chinese Workers and the Law:

Misplaced Trust?

2

Ivan Franceschini

Laying Off Responsibility:

Microcredit, Entrepreneurship, and

China’s Industrial Retrenchment

Nicholas Loubere

3

The Resistance of Walmart Workers

in China: A Breakthrough in the

Chinese Labour Movement

Anita Chan

On 21 June, the Walmart Chinese Work-ers’ Association (WCWA) announced in its blog that it and its American counter-part, OUR Walmart (Organisation United for Respect at Walmart), had joined hands in cyberspace to discuss how to move for-ward in their struggle against Walmart. This marks a new stage in recent Chinese labour history. This time the news is not about a leader of the All-China Federa-tion of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the of-ficial government trade union, shaking hands with a leader from a foreign trade union. Nor is it Han Dongfang, the well-known director of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, shaking hands with the world’s trade union leaders. Instead, a group of workers have them-selves, through persistent efforts to break through Chinese walls, finally succeeded in reaching out to co-workers overseas. This is the culmination of a number of breakthroughs in the last ten years.

Walmart in China has more than four hundred stores in 169 cities, and employs around one hundred thousand people. The WCWA is an online network link-ing up a large number of these Walmart

Recently, Walmart workers in China joined hands with their international counterparts to move forward in the struggle against the American retail giant. This development has momentous implications for the Chinese labour movement, which is finally linking up with the outside world without going through any inter-mediary. Yet, this achievement urgently needs international support to be maintained.

The Resistance

of Walmart

Workers in China:

A Breakthrough in

the Chinese Labour

Movement

Anita Chan

A group of Walmart worker activists stages a protest at a Walmart store in Shenzhen on 29 June. On their shirts is written: ‘Implement the spirit of President Xi’s speeches; Walmart employees stand up; oppose the elections of puppet unions.’

Zhang Jun: Electrician

and Labour Activist

11 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

with one of the ACFTU’s deputy chairs, who flew to Shandong to personally in-struct the provincial union to recognise the striking Ole Wolff union. The fight ended when Ole Wolff deliberately relo-cated the factory to South China. Zhang lost his own job and became a Walmart worker in his neighbourhood.

The emergence of the WCWA can be traced back to 2006. At that time, Andy Stern, the president of the Service Em-ployees International Union (SEIU), the biggest union in the United States, was launching an international campaign against Walmart. He had come to China a couple of times seeking to persuade the ACFTU to join and, for its own reasons, the ACFTU was receptive. At the same time, the ACFTU was also under strong pressure from the Chinese government to contain a rising number of strikes in the country. Under such circumstances it de-cided to do something that had not been done since the 1950s: to organise work-ers.

employees across the country. It was set up in 2014 by several Walmart workers headed by Zhang Jun, a forty-year-old electrician then employed at a Walmart store in Yantai City, Shandong Province. These core members’ original intention was to create a platform where Walmart workers could exchange experiences, air grievances, and provide moral support to each other. Work conditions and wages at Walmart have been sliding dramatically in recent years, to such an extent that today front line workers’ monthly take-home pay is often lower than the Chinese legal minimum wage.

Zhang Jun was involved in union or-ganising before he arrived at Walmart. In fact, he had helped organise the first democratically-elected workplace union born out of a strike. The year was 2006. A group of sixty women workers in a small Danish electronics company named Ole Wolff felt aggrieved at their work con-ditions and agitated to set up their own union. Zhang was then a worker in a fac-tory nearby and became their legal con-sultant. They struggled for four years against management and the district-level trade union to keep their union going. At one point, Zhang was exchanging texts

2006: A Year of

Significance

A group of Walmart worker activists stages a protest at a Walmart store in Shenzhen on 29 June. On the back of their shirts is written: ‘Walmart employees stand up; boycott the comprehensive working hour system; oppose cheating and keep protecting our rights.’

In mid-May, Walmart announced that it was going to use a ‘comprehensive work-ing hour system’, which is very similar to American Walmart’s ‘open work hour system’ [see the brief at p. 7], allowing ex-treme flexibility in the allocation of work hours. Upon hearing of this plan the Chi-nese Walmart workers were mortified. If the system were implemented, regular work hours would have been thrown out of the window, there would be no more overtime and thus no more overtime pay which workers have been relying on to supplement the low income, and in addi-tion they would have had to come to work anytime on call. Suddenly the number of people in the WCWA’s online groups jumped to around ten thousand.

One of the WCWA’s strategies to stop Walmart’s flagrant abuse of workplace conditions was to hold the trade union responsible. The WCWA sent appeals for help to different levels of the ACFTU, including two open letters signed by a thousand workers addressed to the union

headquarters. They lodged a series of

complaints about Walmart’s violations of the Chinese labour law and the company’s heavy-handedness in forcing workers to sign a consent form for the new working hour system. Employers are required to collect the signatures of the employees before they can apply for official permis-sion to use the new work hour system. Some managers, who were under intense pressure from upper levels of Walmart to get these signatures, reportedly locked some workers who refused to sign in stor-age rooms, and threatened them with de-motion and layoffs. Other workers were inundated by management phone calls and texts, and two workers even suffered mental breakdowns due to the incessant hounding of their superiors.

Up until that point, whenever it had wanted to set up a branch in a company, the ACFTU had gone directly to the man-agement to establish a workplace union that managers would be able to control. This time, however, the ACFTU experi-mented with organising Walmart work-ers ‘underground’, in much the same way that American trade unions quietly seek out workers in non-unionised factories to set up unions. In less than two months, the ACFTU was able to set up about one and half dozen Walmart union branches, holding surreptitious night-time union committee elections and founding cer-emonies. But after two months, the

AC-FTU changed its mind and signed a mem-orandum of understanding with Walmart which effectively allowed Walmart to set up management-controlled unions in more than one hundred stores. Since then, Walmart union branches have been staffed by human resource managers, who have signed so-called ‘collective agreements’ in the name of the workers.

Yet, as of today the ACFTU still boasts of its high unionisation rate in China’s Wal-mart stores.

Still, the initial spate of democratic elections in 2006 had unintended conse-quences. Workers who had participated in those elections and are still working in Walmart stores now want to get their unions back. All four of the labour activ-ists who set up the WCWA are in their mid-forties, and in the past couple of years, when some of the workplace union branches were due for new elections, they fought to register as candidates. Walmart management, with the tacit sup-port of the local unions, has put a vari-ety of obstacles in their way and has even fired two of them—they are now suing the company for unfair dismissal. Zhang Jun did not run, but quit his job earlier this year. Thus three of the four activists now in charge of running the WCWA network are former, rather than current, Walmart employees.

The Latest Struggle: the

‘Comprehensive Working

Hour System’

13 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

symbolic significance. August first was an important day and place for the city of Nanchang in Chinese Communist history. That day in 1927 the Nanchang Upris-ing led by key Chinese Communist Party leader rose up against the Nationalist Party. The Nanchang Walmart workers prided themselves for having this priv-ilege of starting a rebellion against the world’s biggest foreign capital in a store which bears this historically iconic name. They cried in unison: ‘At this store, we are carrying on the glorious tradition of the Chinese Communist Party!’

But still why this particular store? In-deed, for Walmart workers in China this store has a glorious past of its own that has nothing to do with Chinese history. In 2006, this was one of those stores which were able to hold a genuinely democratic union election under the ACFTU’s tu-telage. An ordinary worker armed with self-taught knowledge of the labour law by the name of Gao Haitao ran as a candidate and was elected as the union chairman. He fought with Walmart man-agement over a number of workplace is-sues. When Walmart issued a blanket col-lective agreement for all store unions to sign, Gao demanded some changes. The struggle became heated and the news The fourth activist, who is still a

Wal-mart worker, called the ACFTU Beijing office and insisted on talking to a re-sponsible official. An official came on the phone and the worker recounted Walmart’s illegal behaviour, saying that workers wanted to re-elect their union branch heads. The official said he would look into the matter, but nothing hap-pened.

On 14 June, the Guangdong Province Federation of Trade Unions made a sud-den public newspaper statement that a Walmart-style work hour system can only be used by workplaces that operate a spe-cial roster system. Retail stores are not el-igible to apply, and using it is a violation of the labour law. Blatantly missing from this statement is any mention of Walmart, or of the fact that some Walmart workers are in rebellion. For a while, it seemed the workers had gained a small victory. But because the union had not taken any concrete action the announcement has not deterred Walmart from continuing to force workers to sign off on the new work hour system.

Having exhausted all possible channels to stop Walmart’s coercion, workers in a Walmart store in Jiangxi province called ‘Nanchang August First Walmart Store’ ‘fired the first shot’. On 1 July, starting at seven in the morning, seventy workers, all wearing the red Walmart uniforms with a protest sign stuck on their backs, went marching up and down the store yelling slogans like ‘Boycott Walmart’s Comprehensive Working Hours System!’ and ‘Defend Our Rights to the End!’ The news of the strike immediately spread through the WCWA network. Supportive messages poured in and the Nanchang August First Store was hailed as a model store by the aggrieved Walmart workers.

That the first strike broke out in this particular Walmart store is itself of great

Strike as the last option

A group of Walmart worker activists stages a protest at a Walmart store in Shenzhen on 29 June.

Anita Chan is Visiting Fellow at the Political and Social Change Depart-ment, Australian National University. Prior to that, she was Research Pro-fessor at University of Technology Sydney. Her current research focuses on Chinese labour issues. She has published widely on Chinese work-ers’ conditions, the Chinese trade union and labour rights issues. On Walmart, she published the edited volume Walmart in China (2011). Her other recent publications include the edited books Labor in Vietnam (2011) and Chinese Workers in Comparative

Perspective (2015).

Anita Chan

headquar-ters in Beijing. As a model of a coura-geous trade union chairman, Gao was in-vited to Beijing to meet high level union officials. But when he continued to resist to sign the collective agreement, the AC-FTU abandoned him and, in the end, he was fired. This case was widely reported in the Chinese press.

According to information circulated online in the WCWA network, the Nan-chang store today is staffed by a sizeable number of older workers. Some of them must have fought alongside Gao ten years ago. It is perhaps not surprising then that when the campaign against the new work-ing hour system began, it was workers in this Nanchang store who first came out to declare that none of them had signed nor would sign the consent form.

On the second day of the strike, city authorities finally appeared at the store to find out what the protest was about. They then left and said that they would consider their complaints. At the time of finalizing this draft, it is still unsure whether other Walmart workers would also rise up in rebellion.

Walmart employees are among the lowest paid workers in China and also globally and are therefore some the most vulnerable. If their recent struggles rep-resent an important step forward for the Chinese labour movement, they still need strong international support to avoid los-ing what they have achieved thus far. It is therefore important that global trade unions, international NGOs, and other relevant actors mobilise their networks to put pressure on Walmart headquarters in the United States and China, and ask for the support of the ACFTU leadership to make sure that the rights of this active cohort of Chinese workers are not in-fringed upon once again.

A Walmart worker in Chengdu holds a sign in support of American Walmart workers‘ fight for a 15 USD minimum wage.

An Appeal for

International Solidarity

Postscript, 4 July 2016: The latest news as of today is that one other store in Nanchang, one in Harbin, and in one in Chengdu have gone on strike. In addition to fighting their own battle, the WCWA has also launched a solidarity campaign in support of American Walmart workers’ fight for a 15 USD minimum wage.

One fascinating question concerning labour activism in contemporary China regards the attitude of Chinese migrant workers towards the law. In recent years, much has been written about the ‘rights awakening’ (quanli de juexing) of Chinese workers. But what kind of rights are we talking about? Do they respond to an en-tirely subjective concept of justice or do they somehow coincide with the entitle-ments provided by the labour legislation? And what is the relationship that binds legal awareness (falü yishi), rights

con-sciousness (quanli yishi), and solidarity (tuanjie yishi)? That these elements do not necessarily go hand in hand is high-lighted by the following testimony by a labour activist whom I interviewed in Shenzhen in 2014:

If ten [young migrants] come to me say-ing that their rights have been violated, they usually want to sue the company, but don’t know how. Although I suggest that they sue the company together, they gen-erally choose to do it separately. I don’t think of this as a contradiction. If legal consciousness and solidarity conscious-ness are so low, how can they have such a high awareness of rights protection

(wei-quan yishi)? For example, if one of their

fathers had his rights violated, he would choose to stay silent. If the son has his rights violated, he will explode and fight. If he didn’t sign a labour contract and gets fired, he will ask for double wage as compensation. But they don’t know any-thing about these compensations, they only know that their bosses have deceived them.

[Interview, Shenzhen, October 2014] It is with these and other questions in mind that a few years ago I undertook a survey among the employees of nine Ital-ian metal mechanic factories (either joint ventures or wholly foreign owned en-terprises) in three Chinese cities: Shen-zhen, Yangzhou, and Chongqing. In three rounds of interviews—respectively in

In recent years, much has been written about the ‘rights awakening’ (quanli de juexing) of Chinese workers. But what kind of rights are we talking about? Do they respond to an entirely subjective concept of justice or do they somehow coincide with the entitlements provided by the labour legislation? On the basis of a survey carried out among 1,379 employees of Italian metal mechanic companies in China, this article will attempt to answer three key questions: how do Chinese workers perceive the labour contract? How much do they know about labour legislation and how does this knowledge affect their trust of the law? What do they think about going on strike as a strat-egy to protect their rights?

Chinese Workers

and the Law:

Misplaced Trust?

Ivan Franceschini

Wu Tingshan, a worker in Shenzhen interviewd for the documentary

Dreamwork China in 2011

A fuller set of data will be presented in the author’s forthcom-ing book Lavoro e diritti in Cina: Politiche sul lavoro e attivismo

operaio nella fabbrica del mondo (Labour and rights in China:

Labour policies and worker activism in the world factory), Il Mulino, Bologna, 2016.

2012, 2014, and 2015— I was able to con-duct 1,379 questionnaires at the gates of the various factories, without any knowl-edge or interference by the management. The workers in my sample were mostly men (74.2 percent); 24.5 percent of them were born before 1980, 45.4 percent in the Eighties, and 30.1 percent in the Nineties; and their educational level was medi-um-high, with 32.7 percent of the work-ers having graduated from middle school, 22.1 percent from high school, 20.2 per-cent from middle technical school, and 18.9 percent from higher technical school.

Were all these workers migrants? Ac-tually, only 63.7 percent of the respon-dents had a rural household registration (nongye hukou), the traditional parame-ter to deparame-termine a worker’s status as an internal migrant. Still, taking the hukou as a parameter that defines the identity of Chinese workers today may be quite treacherous, as many ‘urban’ employ-ees of the factories in Chongqing and peri-urban Yangzhou were local farmers whose status had been ‘upgraded’ fol-lowing the new policies of forced urban-isation adopted by the local authorities. Similarly, only 33 percent of the workers came from a different province—with the significant exception of Shenzhen, where only 11.3 percent of the workers were from Guangdong—a finding that mirrors the growing importance of intra-provin-cial migrations in China.

In my survey I attempted to measure the awareness of these workers regarding some key aspects of labour law, as well as their expectations towards wages and work hours. Yet in this article I will fo-cus on three questions: how do Chinese workers perceive the labour contract? How much do they know about labour legislation and how does this knowledge affect their trust of the law? What do they think about going on strike as a strategy to protect their rights?

At the cornerstone of the discourse of the party-state on ‘harmonious labour relations’ (hexie laodong guanxi), labour contracts can provide some interesting insights on the way Chinese workers re-late to the labour law and the relevant propaganda. 97.2 percent of the work-ers in my survey had signed an individ-ual labour contract, a clear proof of the commitment of the authorities to enforce the labour contract system, at least in the industry I considered (in other sectors, for instance the construction sector, the rate is remarkably lower, and according to official data in 2015 only 36.2 percent

of all migrant workers had signed a la-bour contract with their employer). But how many workers believed in the impor-tance of the contract as an instrument to protect their rights? A question I asked is whether the workers had read the clauses of the contract before signing it. Only 26.7 percent of them had read them care-fully (zixi yuedu), while 46.5 percent just had had a quick look (suibian kan), and 26.8 percent had signed without reading (qianming eryi). This seems to display a certain disinterest in the labour contract, as if it were an irrelevant piece of paper. Yet, when directly asked whether they considered contracts as an effective tool to protect their rights, 22.3 percent of the workers responded affirmatively (keyi) and 49.2 percent was relatively optimis-tic (hai keyi), compared with only 7.3 per-cent who expressed disbelief (bu keyi), and 21.2 percent who did not know how to answer. In essence, almost two thirds of the workers trusted the capacity of la-bour contracts to protect them.

I then asked whom they thought was the main beneficiary of a labour contract. Although the Labour Contract Law that came into force in 2008 is rather favour-able to workers when it comes to the resolution and severance of labour rela-tions, somehow unsurprisingly 82.5 per-cent of the respondents believed that a labour contract benefitted both employer and employee, while only 3.5 percent

Labour Contracts

17 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

declared that the worker was the one to benefit the most. Still, there was a signifi-cant minority of workers (12.8 percent) who believed that the labour contract benefitted only the company. This was because in the eyes of some workers a la-bour contract is a significant restraint to mobility, and mobility—i.e. ‘voting with your feet’ (yi jiao toupiao)—often is the only way to resist corporate exploitation. As a migrant worker whom I interviewed in 2011 for the documentary Dreamwork

China said:

A contract? It is like this: if you sign it, you cannot leave for the next three months. If you don’t sign it, you can leave whenever you want, even before a month. If it is an annual contract, you have to work for at least three months or you cannot quit. This is the labour contract. [Interview, Shenzhen, January 2011]

This relative confidence in labour contracts opens some further questions about how Chinese workers perceive the labour law. Without going into too much detail, I found that the workers in my sample to have a selective knowledge of the provisions of the labour legislation, exemplified by the 1995 Labour Law and the 2008 Labour Contract Law. In par-ticular, they were very aware of clauses that affected their direct economic inter-ests—such as those that regulate the way overtime wages are calculated (90.6 per-cent of the workers were aware)—while knowing very little about other aspects of the labour legislation, which they proba-bly perceived as less relevant to their in-come. For instance, just 17.5 percent of the workers knew that they were supposed to work no more than thirty-six hours of overtime a month. Similarly, only 25.1 percent of the workers could write down the correct local minimum wage (on the

whole, though, I found that the higher a worker’s basic wage, the less likely he/she is to know the correct minimum wage). Even more important, I found a clear di-vide between the knowledge of individ-ual rights—generally low but still exist-ing—and that of collective rights. Many workers had no clear idea about what a trade union is (11.4 percent had never heard the word ‘trade union’ before), and 98.2 percent of the respondents had no idea of what ‘collective negotiation’ (jiti

xieshang)—the Chinese watered-down

version of collective bargaining—was. In spite of (or maybe due to) this highly selective knowledge, when I asked the workers whether they believed that the existing labour legislation was able to protect them, most of them were quite optimist. 5.7 percent were absolutely sure that it could (wanquan neng) and 49.6 percent were slightly less sure, but still quite positive about it (yinggai keyi). On the contrary, 34.1 percent were dubious (yexu neng) and 10.5 percent were defi-nitely sceptical (bu neng). If these results display a considerable confidence in the law, it is interesting that this perception does not derive from a personal experi-ence with the Chinese legal system. In fact, only 3.3 percent of the workers in the sample had dealt with a labour dispute by legal means before. This apparently con-firms what Mary Gallagher and Yuhua Wang found out in a previous study, that

‘non-users [of the legal system] tend to have vague but benevolent notions of the legal system and its effectiveness’.

How do strikes figure within such a ‘benevolent notion’ of the legal system? My survey shows that trusting the law and resorting to strikes are not necessar-ily mutually exclusive. While China has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which at article 8.1 (d) binds the

govern-Legal Knowledge and

Trust towards the Law

ment to ensure ‘the right to strike, pro-vided that it is exercised in conformity with the laws of the particular country’, the Chinese legislation does not mention the right to strike at all, consigning it to a grey area. Since even Chinese schol-ars have not reached a conclusion on the legality of industrial actions in China, I therefore did not expect the workers to have a clear idea on this issue. Yet, when I asked them whether they believed that going on strike was legal or illegal, I was surprised to find out that 38.5 percent of the respondents said that it was legal, compared with only 13.9 percent who believed the opposite (the rest did not know). That such a high percentage of workers expressed the belief that strikes are legal is quite impressive. It means that many workers in China believe that the law—and therefore the apparatus of the party-state—will support them in the event of a strike. This may be taken as a hint of the extent to which the work of propaganda and legal dissemination un-dertaken by the Chinese authorities in the past two decades has succeeded. Still, the idea that going on strike is ‘le-gal’ does not mean that Chinese workers are willing to protest at the slightest per-ceived violation of their rights. The right to strike is often framed by the workers in moral rather than legal terms, as a last resort after all other avenues of redress have failed. As a young respondent said: ‘In a situation in which there is no choice other than going on strike, you cannot say that it is illegal. Still, the workers do not want to go on strike without rea-son’ [Interview, Shenzhen, April 2012]. Nevertheless, when I asked what they thought about going on strike as a strat-egy to protect their rights, 43.3 percent of the respondents were either favour-able or extremely favourfavour-able, compared with only 26.8 percent who were against or absolutely against it (29.8 percent did not know).

The data presented in this article show that when discussing the ‘rights awakening’ of Chinese workers it is im-portant to consider what we mean by the term ‘rights’. In particular, more at-tention should be paid to the way these workers respond to the official discourse on labour rights promoted by the party-state through the labour law and other relevant policy documents. As I have at-tempted to show, the official discourse is deeply rooted in the mind of the work-ers in my sample. This can been seen in two respects: the workers’ conviction that labour contracts and the labour law can protect them; and their selective knowledge of the labour law provisions, strongly unbalanced towards individ-ual rights with direct economic implica-tions. This ‘benevolent notion’ of the le-gal system even affects the perception of strikes, which are considered ‘legal’ by a very significant portion of the workforce. This means that many Chinese workers believe that the apparatus of the party-state will support them in their decision to go on strike—at least as long as they have a ‘reasonable’ motivation to do so. If these findings do not provide a definite answer to the wider theoretical questions outlined at the beginning of the article, they nonetheless warrant some further attention when discussing the ‘awaken-ing’ of the Chinese working class.

Conclusions

Ivan Franceschini is a Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the Australian Centre on China in the World working on a project on Chinese labour in global perspective. From 2006 to 2015, he lived in China, where he worked as a journalist and as a consultant in the field of development coopera-tion. His research interests focus on Chinese labour and civil society.

Ivan Franceschini

19 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

When the news broke earlier this year that Chinese state-owned steel and coal companies would be laying off anywhere between 1.8 to 6 million workers over the next two to three years, the government quickly moved to provide assurances that the socioeconomic fallout would be mit-igated through 150 million yuan in assis-tance for the newly unemployed. On 15

April 2016, the Ministry of Human Re-sources and Social Security, along with six other national government agencies, jointly issued guidelines broadly outlining the ways in which the laid-off workers will be supported. While the guidelines

do not provide details of how much fund-ing will be allocated to the different types of assistance, or which agencies will be responsible for their implementation, the document does specify four key measures aimed at reducing the negative outcomes of the restructuring: career counselling and retraining for laid-off workers; the facili-tation of early retirement for eligible indi-viduals; information sharing across regions to facilitate the movement of workers to areas where they are needed; and support for laid-off workers who wish to engage in self-employment through entrepreneurial pursuits.

The government’s strategy, therefore, can be seen as having two distinct objec-tives. The first seeks to streamline the cur-rent system of government employment through redistribution and retirement. The second is aimed at redefining what constitutes ‘normal’ employment in China through a re-orientation towards entrepre-neurship and self-employment. The guide-lines state that this second objective will be achieved through tax relief for new enter-prises, and subsidised loans for the laid-off workers who initiate them. This column critically examines some of the implica-tions that arise from replacing large-scale wage employment with credit to promote entrepreneurial activity. In particular, it shows that the promotion of micro-entre-preneurship as a ‘solution’ for mass layoffs shifts responsibility for livelihoods and

Nicholas Loubere

In early 2016, the Chinese government an-nounced that state-owned steel and coal compa-nies would be restructured, resulting in the loss of 1.8 to 6 million jobs. In April, seven govern-ment agencies jointly release a set of guidelines outlining a strategy for mitigating the fallout from this latest round of mass layoffs. One of the key elements of this strategy is the encour-agement of entrepreneurial activity through tax relief and subsidised ‘microcredit’ for laid-off workers. Does the promotion of entrepreneur-ship and self-employment have the potential to meet the needs of the newly unemployed? Or is this strategy actually part of a wider ideological project aimed at individualising responsibility for social welfare and fragmenting labour?

Laying Off

Responsibility:

Microcredit,

Entrepreneurship,

and China’s

Industrial

Retrenchment

A rural credit cooperative in a township where the author conducted fieldwork.

welfare from the state to marginal individ-uals and groups, while, at the same time, re-ducing the capacity for collective action by organised labour. [1] The column also ques-tions—at a fundamental level—the ability of individual entrepreneurship to fill the gap-ing hole (in the economy and society) left by mass layoff events.

This is not the first time that targeted credit for micro-entrepreneurship has been identified as a means of dealing with socioeconomic problems in contemporary China. In the 1980s and 1990s, various government ministries established or sup-ported microcredit programs targeting pov-erty and ‘underdevelopment’ in rural areas. In the wake of the large-scale restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which, accord-ing to some estimates, resulted in

twen-ty-five to forty million workers being made redundant—the government established the ‘Employment Microcredit Program’ (xiagang shiye zaijiuye xiao’e danbao

dai-kuan) in urban areas most affected by the

retrenchment. The program provides small loans at zero percent interest in an effort to allow the newly unemployed to unleash their ‘natural’ entrepreneurial abilities and spark ‘bottom up’ employment opportuni-ties.

After being piloted for a few years, the Chinese government considered the Em-ployment Microcredit Program to be a policy success and it was scaled up na-tionwide. Initially, microcredit was only available in cities to those who could pro-vide formal documentation proving their laid-off worker status. This formal doc-umentation was not always forthcoming, however, as navigating the bureaucracy often took certain types of knowledge and connections, and many SOEs did not even establish re-employment centres. In 2006, the program was extended to rural areas,

with the target group being expanded to in-clude migrant workers laid off from urban enterprises who wished to return to their rural origins to start businesses. Currently, the Ministry of Human Resources and So-cial Security administers the program. It recommends borrowers to local branches of state-owned banks and organises for the Ministry of Finance to pay the inter-est on the loans. In most localities loans of 100,000 yuan are provided to individuals for up to one year. Borrowers do not need collateral, but should instead have a ‘trust-worthy’ guarantor.

The Employment Microcredit Program is conceived of as reducing the negative impacts of retrenchment by creating an alternative to large-scale wage employ-ment. This fundamental reshaping of how livelihoods are produced is one of the ide-ological goals of the microcredit move-ment. In the words of Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Ban-gladesh and the most prominent advocate of microcredit globally: ‘One of the sig-nificant social impacts of the microcredit movement has been the realization that the key to alleviating poverty is often not the creation of ‘jobs’—that is, salaried work for large corporate employers—but rather the encouragement of self-employment for all individuals…’.[2] In other words, the microcredit movement considers self-em-ployment as a valid (and even superior) al-ternative to large-scale wage employment, and sees entrepreneurship as being a uni-versal human quality that, if nurtured, has the potential to allow individuals to pro-vide for themselves.

Therefore, the promotion of microcredit as a response to layoffs should be under-stood as involving a transfer of responsibil-ity for livelihoods and social welfare from the state to households and individuals. In-deed, for the majority of workers laid off

An Entrepreneurial

Solution

Shifting Responsibility for

Livelihoods and Welfare

21 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

in the 1990s and early 2000s, microcredit was offered as a replacement for the ‘iron rice bowl’ (tiefanwan)—i.e. stable life-long employment in a state ‘work unit’ (danwei) that included a salary and benefits. While most workers that will be affected by the impending retrenchment no longer enjoy ‘iron rice bowl’-style employment, they will, nevertheless, be saddled with the bur-den of seeking out entrepreneurial ways of earning a sufficient income for survival (and repaying their loans). And failure to successfully take on these new responsibil-ities comes with dire consequences. This rewriting of the social contract is not only significant because it represents an indi-vidualisation of responsibility, but also— and more crucially—because this responsi-bility is being devolved to individuals who are relatively marginal and lacking in re-sources, such as low-level SOE employees and migrant workers living from pay-check to pay-check.

What does this rewriting of the so-cial contract entail for labour relations in China? In addition to devolving respon-sibility from the state to individuals, the provision of microcredit in an attempt to foster entrepreneurship implicitly neces-sitates the fragmentation and atomisation of labour. While Ivan Franceschini’s con-tribution to this issue highlights the fact that many Chinese workers do not have a clear conception of what ‘collective rights’ or ‘collective action’ actually entail, the goal of microcredit to redefine ‘the house-hold as a production unit and self employ-ment as a natural way for people to make a living’ [3] effectively renders these con-cepts meaningless. The industrial proletar-iat—with all their collective ambitions and grievances—are replaced by marginal (and indebted) micro-entrepreneurs struggling in competition with each other for their very survival.

Ultimately, therefore, the provision of microcredit to laid-off workers is about more than simply unleashing pent-up en-trepreneurial spirit and allowing people to provide for themselves. Rather, it is a key element in a wider project engaged in sys-temically transforming labour relations in China. After all, there is no solidarity be-tween competing micro-entrepreneurs. Nor is any labour negotiation possible, as it is the intangible ‘invisible hand’ of the market that determines working condi-tions and remuneration for the self-em-ployed entrepreneur. In this way, the shift from large-scale wage employment to a so-ciety of atomised micro-entrepreneurs is part of a strategy to deal with the spectre of organised labour unrest, which is one of the Chinese government’s major preoccu-pations.

There are also other critical questions that need to be raised with regard to the fundamental ability of individual entrepre-neurship (financed through microcredit) to fill the employment gap left by indus-trial retrenchment. For one, this strategy neglects the fact that, even in the best of cases, many entrepreneurial endeavours fail. In the case of the most recent round of layoffs, most of the newly unemployed micro-entrepreneurs will be from just two industries: steel and coal. Moreover, if past rounds of retrenchment are any indication, they will be comparatively less educated/ skilled, approaching middle age, and pre-dominantly female with a substantially higher load of family responsibilities. They will, therefore, primarily have the same skill sets and will probably engage in the same types of entrepreneurial activity. This suggests a sudden influx of certain kinds of business in a highly competitive and un-forgiving market—i.e. a ‘race to the bottom’ undertaken by a new, and increasingly des-perate, ‘micro-entrepreneurial class’ com-posed of the newly unemployed. While

Labour Relations in a

Society of Entrepreneurs

An Answer to

Unemployment?

some will undoubtedly be successful, many others will fail and, as such, will be pushed further to the margins as they default on their debt and have no access to the live-lihood resources previously provided by their employers.

It is also important to point out an im-plicit paradox in how microcredit is envis-aged as assisting the unemployed. On the one hand, microcredit programs are con-ceived of as promoting a type of ‘grassroots’ or ‘bottom-up’ development that is sepa-rate and autonomous from the wider struc-tural contradictions in the economy that produced the unemployment in the first place. However, in order to achieve this de-velopment, the would-be entrepreneurial beneficiaries of microcredit must become incorporated into the ‘modern’ socioeco-nomic system through integration into the market where they will sell their wares or services. In other words, there is really no escape from the socioeconomic processes that put these microcredit borrowers out of work. Their entrepreneurial pursuits do not exist in some alternate dimension; instead, they are intricately linked to the dominant market-oriented system operat-ing in contemporary China that has cre-ated the conditions requiring mass layoffs. For example, in one of the townships were I conducted fieldwork the local economy appeared to be thriving, with 122 small and medium businesses operating in the township centre. However, over thirty-one percent of these businesses were directly related to the housing construction indus-try, which relies on the sustained flow of remittances from migrant workers in ur-ban areas back to the township to build new houses for their ‘left-behind’ family members. In short, this was no ‘grassroots’ economy, but was instead an economy fully dependent on the system of domestic mi-grant work—often through employment in the large urban SOEs now engaged in mass layoffs—for its continued existence.

Ultimately, the issues raised in this short piece suggest that microcredit and the pro-motion of entrepreneurship for laid-off workers should be seen as an ideological re-orientation, rather than a ‘solution’ to the social and economic problems result-ing from a sudden increase in unemploy-ment. Restructuring SOEs and encouraging laid-off workers to become entrepreneurs through the provision of subsidised credit shifts responsibility for livelihoods and welfare from the employer (in this case the state) to the individual, while fragmenting labour relations and collective identity. Microcredit is also an objectively flawed response to retrenchment, as it is not pos-sible for individual entrepreneurship to sufficiently meet the need for employment created by the mass layoffs. Instead, mi-crocredit for entrepreneurship is a smoke-screen that serves to temporarily obscure the fact that China is (and has been) under-going a sustained social, cultural, and eco-nomic transformation that is fundamen-tally rewriting the social contract in order to devolve responsibility to the individual, while simultaneously eroding the possibil-ity for individuals to contest these devel-opments through solidarity and collective action.

Conclusions

[1] Similar observations have been made about microcredit in other contexts. See, for example, Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t

Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism,

London: Zed Books, 2010.

[2] Muhammad Yunus and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: The

Autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, Founder of the Grameen Bank, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: p. 85.

[3] Ibid.

Nicholas Loubere is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University. His research examines socioeconomic develop-ment in rural China, with a partic-ular focus on microcredit and the rural financial system.

Nicholas Loubere

23 MADE IN CHINA - CHINA COLUMNS

Interpreting the Rule of Law in China

Edited by Elisa Nesossi

With the participation of

Joshua Rosenzweig

Ewan Smith

Susan Trevaskes

Joshua Rosenzweig

Joshua is a Business and Human Rights Strat-egy Advisor/Analyst at Amnesty Internation-al’s East Asia Regional Office in Hong Kong, where he has lived since 2008. An observer of all things Chinese for more than 25 years, he has more than a decade of experience researching, analyzing, and teaching about human rights developments and criminal justice in China. His current work focuses on the human rights impacts of Chinese business operations overseas and promoting responsi-ble business conduct and corporate account-ability. The views expressed in this piece are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of Amnesty International.

Ewan Smith

Susan Trevaskes

Ewan is a Lecturer at Trinity College (Ox-ford). He is admitted to practice in New York, where he worked for Debevoise and Plimpton. In 2005, he joined the Foreign and Com-monwealth Office and worked on UK policy towards the Middle East and China. From 2009-2014 he was posted to Beijing, where he analysed developments in Chinese leadership politics and government policy, with a partic-ular focus on the reform of the legal system and the fight against corruption.

Susan is a professor of the Griffith Criminol-ogy Institute at Griffith University (Austra-lia) and an Adjunct Director of the Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. Her main research interests in-clude the death penalty, policing, drug crime, public shaming events, and justice system reform in China.

With its ample resonance both within China and internationally, the ‘rule of law’ (yifa

zhiguo) is an expression that can justify the

most disparate justice reforms. It is both a political value worth defending and a rea-son for consternation; it is an ideal that is inherently troubling and troubled by its in-terlocutors, advocates, and critics. For this reason, even the term ‘yifa zhiguo’ has been translated differently by different interlo-cutors, with ‘rule of law’, ‘rule by law’ and ‘ruling the country according to the law’ being the most frequent renderings in the English language.

While the rule of law has become a key com-ponent of the Chinese legal-political vocab-ulary since the onset of the reform period, under Xi Jinping’s leadership it appears to have increased in importance. Since Xi Jin-ping took the helm in 2012, he has chosen to adopt exactly this expression to shape his policy and justice agendas. But the au-thoritarian way in which the concept has been used thus far has, in many quarters, produced a palpable sense of surprise and dismay over the future of the Chinese legal system. The current leadership is shaping what at first glance seems to be quite incon-gruous goals—fighting corruption and the

Interpreting the Rule of Law in China

Edited by Elisa Nesossi,

with the participation of Joshua Rosenzweig, Ewan Smith, Susan Trevaskes

erosion of institutional credibility; fighting criminals and dissenters who threaten sta-bility; and guarding against national and international security threats—all under the same rhetorical and ideological rubric. During the last year, the rule of law has served the practical function of maintain-ing social stability and controllmaintain-ing dissent. It has equally justified anti-corruption campaigns targeting party officials, and the repression of civil society and human rights activism. Although their activities remained well within the legal or consti-tutional rights of Chinese citizens, law-yers, labour activists, and people working for NGOs became key targets of repression, with hundreds of arrests of lawyers in the summer of 2015 alone.

Through a discussion between three experts on the historical and ideological develop-ment of socio-legal issues in China—Joshua Rosenzweig, Ewan Smith and Susan Tre-vaskes—this Forum aims at reframing our understanding of Xi’s ‘rule of law’ agenda and enriching our sense of the meaning of this contested expression in the contempo-rary political context.

‘Yifa zhiguo’, the Chinese expression often translated as ‘rule of law’